Antananarivo

Sierra Leone.

The song tonight is on heavy radio rotation in Antananarivo.

It's by Anatal from Madagascar.

Yeah.

Their first group match produced an important 3-1 victory away to Sudan.

They later held Senegal to a 2-2 draw in Antananarivo before defeating Equatorial Guinea in consecutive 1-0 victories.

On October 16, 2018, the home victory over Equatorial Guinea confirmed the breakthrough.

After decades of failed attempts, Madagascar had qualified for the Africa Cup of Nations.

To see how it happened, I began at the mines themselves.

I took a propeller plane from the capital, Antananarivo, and drove three hours through farmland to a mine called Madagold.

The mine sits in a dry valley in the northern part of the island, surrounded by a busy market fueled by gold rush cash.

Miners have worked here for generations, but the increase in gold price in recent years has created a bustling, unlicensed operation.

I think about the whale calf that washed ashore at Nozab last month.

Ten kilometers northeast of here, officials went to the village to warn fishermen not to eat or sell the meat while samples were sent to Antananarivo for testing.

It was a somber moment.

The ocean gives and it takes.

And in so doing, create a blueprint that other countries can follow.

From Abuja to Antananarivo, where the story is about knowing the system inside out.

I now call on you, Eli Ramamujizwa.

You are in Madagascar and you are our ICC, in-country coordinator there.

And we already saw how they were beginning to budget for immunization financing interventions in their own constituencies.

So kudos for that work.

And we'll fly all the way from Antananarivo and touch down on Freetown in Sierra Leone.

Dr. Abdul Jibril Njai, you are our in-country coordinator in Sierra Leone, and the story there this year is about a team, the caucus chair, the EPI manager, and the Health Alert team, that's our CSO, that walked into the Ministry of Finance together more than once.

Madagascar.

Mamy is a song by Eljo, a popular songwriter and hip hop artist from Antananarivo, Madagascar.

[singing] Havia ramalala.

Maso koza agna.

On the 23rd of August 2017, a 31-year-old man from a rural district developed fever, cough, and struggling breath, the signs of pneumonic plague.

His family set out with him in search of treatment, and that journey passed along a busy transport corridor, a minibus packed with passengers heading for the capital, Antananarivo.

Aboard that bus, among dozens of people pressed shoulder to shoulder for hours, a pneumonic plague patient, without anyone knowing, was releasing the seed of the disease with every cough.

Days later, cases appeared in the capital.

And behind every line of that watchkeeping duty stands a specific kind of person worth naming before the story closes.

The global ledger of plague is not kept by machinery.

It is kept by the laboratory technicians of the Pasteur Institute of Antananarivo running tests through the night of an outbreak, by the highland nurses of Madagascar riding motorcycles along the red dirt roads to bring a week of preventive medicine to each house, by the physicians of Ituri who treat plague with the same composure as malaria, because the disease arrives most years and will arrive again.

By the county health officers of New Mexico and Colorado who hear a phone call about a fever and a swollen gland and already know what to ask next.